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Caltech

Physics Research Conference

Thursday, May 5, 2016
4:00pm to 5:00pm
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East Bridge 201 (Richard P. Feynman Lecture Hall)
When a Symmetry Breaks
Hitoshi Murayama, Professor of Physics, UC Berkeley and Director, Institute for the Physics and Math of the Universe (IPMU), Tokyo,

What is common among a magnet, a flounder, a rack of laundry, your heart on the left of your body, and the Higgs boson? The concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking is ubiquitous among many natural phenomena. I'll describe the basic concept and its applications. In particular, the original concepts from Anderson, Nambu, Goldstone, and Higgs do not quite work in many systems that include a magnet on your fridge. I generalize the concept so that it is applicable to all known natural phenomena around us.

For more information, please contact Sheri Stoll by phone at 395-6608 or by email at [email protected] or visit http://pmaweb.caltech.edu/~physcoll/PhysColl.html.